'I will be with you, whatever' — we dissect the most damning memo Blair wrote to Bush on Iraq

A
demonstrator wearing a mask to impersonate Tony Blair protests
before the release of the John Chilcot report into the Iraq war,
at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in London, Britain July 6,
2016.REUTERS/Peter
Nicholls

A declassified note Tony Blair sent to George W. Bush in
July 2002 looks like the most damning evidence that Blair
committed the country to war with Iraq months before his Cabinet
and Parliament voted on the issue.

The note, declassified as
part of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war, was sent eight
months before Parliament approved military action in Iraq. It
begins with Prime Minister Blair saying: "I will be with you,
whatever," adding that: "Getting rid of Saddam is the right thing
to do."

Blair makes clear reference to the onset of military action
against Iraq, saying that it could be "militarily tricky" and
suggesting ultimatums from the UN over weapons inspections could
be used as "our casus belli" — a Latin phrase that means an
action that justifies war.

The Blair memo is one of the most extraordinary — and compelling
— political war documents you'll ever read. Blair's thinking is
crystal clear. He anticipates all the problems (terrorism,
instability, fairweather coalition partners) that did actually
happen.

Most surprisingly, it is written as if Blair believes that
President Bush doesn't understand quite how difficult the war is
going to be, and as if Blair feels he needs to educate Bush on
the problems he faces.

Here is our dissection of the memo. There is a link to the
entire document below.

"I will be with you, whatever."

The memo opens with this:

Chilcot Report

The date is eight months before the war began, and it reads
as if Blair and Bush have already decided it is going to happen.

Blair and Bush even discuss a date for starting the war - months
beforehand

Chilcot Report

Blair says Saddam would likely break the ultimatums or could be
portrayed as doing so, giving them an excuse to invade. He
writes:

"If he [Saddam Hussein] did say yes, we count in the build-up and
we send teams over and the moment he obstructs, we say: he's back
to his games. That's it. In any event, he probably would screw it
up and not meet the deadline, and if he came forward after the
deadline, we would just refuse to deal."

"In Europe generally, people just don't have the same sense of
urgency post 9/11"

Despite committing to Bush's cause, Blair admits in the memo: "In
Britain, right now I couldn't be sure of support from Parliament,
Party, public or even some of the Cabinet":

Chilcot Report

That paragraph is written as if Blair thinks Bush doesn't realise
the political reality of the time, that the "War on Terror" was a
much lower priority outside America.

"Opinion in the US is quite simply on a different planet"

Blair returns to that theme here:

Chilcot Report

Blair says the US and UK should not "be mucked around by Saddam",
adding that "the danger is he drags us into negotiations," which
suggests Blair was considering force well before the rest of the
UK had been convinced.

In the memo, Blair references discussing the fact that the US and
UK would "do Iraq" with an unnamed Middle Eastern diplomat. But
he tells Bush that it could be politically difficult and calls
for the US and UK to convene a coalition against Iraq.

"Evidence ... I have been told the US thinks this unnecessary"

He calls for Bush to present evidence for the case for war in
Iraq, something Blair astonishingly claims the US feels it
doesn't need. And there is a tantalizing
throwaway line: "as seems possible, add on Al Qaida link":

Chilcot report

The world only learned afterward that there was no Iraq/Al Qaida
link. The context of that line is not clear but Blair's critics
will likely see it as evidence that neither leader believed at
the time that Al Qaida was involved, but they were happy to let
the public think so.

"Getting rid of Saddam is the right thing to do"

This paragraph is another that makes it look like Bush and Blair
had decided on war nearly a year before they embarked on the
conflict, regardless of what the UN, the US Congress and the
British Parliament wanted:

Chilcot Report

This gets to the heart of the Chilcot Report's conclusion: that
Blair effectively put the cart before the horse, deciding to go
to war to remove Saddam Hussein and then trying to justify it
after the fact.

"Recriminations will start fast"

In this section, Blair predicts — accurately, as it turns out —
that if anything goes wrong it will go wrong very quickly and
very badly:

Chilcot Report

"We need this to be going right, not wrong"

Chilcot

This part of the memo is off the main topic but in some ways is
crucial: The US invasion of Afghanistan was proving difficult,
mushy and dangerous — a quagmire that stood as a stark warning
not to take on a second similar conflict. Blair seems alert to
this but feels the need to press Bush on it.

Blair said he took the decision to go to war with "the heaviest
of hearts." "I did it because I thought it was right," he said in
a statement on Wednesday.

At a press conference presenting his defence, Blair was accused
by one journalist of presenting the US with a "blank cheque" for
military action with the phrase "I will be with you, whatever."
Blair denied this, saying: "The whole person of my intervention
was to get them to go down the UN route."

The Chilcot Report says that this cavalier attitude to
intelligence has "produced a damaging legacy, including
undermining trust and confidence in Government statements,
particularly those which rely on intelligence which cannot be
independently verified."